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b.rox Posts

Truncated Scale

Published by Editor B on Thursday, 23 October 2008

A friend recently commented on how our country is politically polarized. Yes, I feel that — but I also feel that many of us are apathetic and alienated from the political process.

How could these both be true? It seems contradictory, paradoxical.

Perhaps the answer, or part of it, has to do with our narrowly circumscribed political dialog. I’ve been puzzling over how to better express the idea.

Say you’re looking at two marks on a wall. If you’re standing very close, with your nose practically touching the plaster, you will see the two marks as rather far apart. But if you stand back and look at the whole wall, you might say that that the marks are quite close together.

Or take a bar graph. It’s a well-known fact that if you chop off the bottom of a bar graph you can exaggerate differences and make them seem bigger. There’s a whole chapter on this in How to Lie with Statistics.

Or say you listened to nothing but grandpa’s record collection. You might think dixieland and bebop represented the absolute opposite ends of the musical spectrum. And you’d be right, insofar as 1940s jazz was concerned.

All of these seem like variations on the same phenomenon. This has surely been observed and documented by those who study human cognition. What’s vexing me is I can’t think of the name for it. The only term I’ve encountered that seems to make sense is “truncated scale,” but that’s hardly ubiquitous.

Anyway, my theory is that some of us are “zoomed in” on two marks on the wall.

Tightly Circumscribed

From this close view, the differences are vast and passions run high. There is a sense of polarization between these two diametrically opposed points.

Continue readingTruncated Scale

Biaxial

Published by Editor B on Friday, 17 October 2008

“All two-valued systems are false.” — Gene Wolfe

Consider the left-right continuum of political thought. It often strikes me as tired and played-out. Yet at other times it seems quite relevant. It certainly is one-dimensional, by definition, and thus it can’t begin to reflect the rich variation and nuances of political philosophy. For example, Nazis and Bolsheviks would be at opposite ends of this spectrum, but don’t they have a lot in common? Something important is missing.

At some point during my undergraduate years, a professor introduced me to a dual-axis model of politics. It doesn’t abandon the well-known left-right continuum. It simply adds another dimension, call it an up-down continuum. Up represents a more authoritarian tendency; down represents the opposite inclination, which might be called libertarian. (Note the small “l” to avoid confusion with the Libertarian Party.) I’m not sure, but I think this model may have first been articulated by the famous psychologist Hans Eysenck.

The result looks something like this:

Political Chart

This clears up some things. Hitler and Stalin would both be at the top of the chart, but in opposite corners.

Of course you could get even more complex. You could add an urban-rural axis or a pacifist-militant axis, to name just a couple. But that quickly gets cumbersome. This dual-axis model seems to work pretty well for me. I’ve carried this mental construct around for the last twenty years, and I find it helpful. I just wish more people knew about it.

Well, turns out there’s a website that allows you to take a short quiz and plot yourself on this model. No, I’m not talking about The World’s Smallest Political Quiz. I’m referring to The Political Compass.

If you haven’t already done so, hie thee to their website and take the test. See where they map you. Does it correspond with where you’d have plotted yourself?

Continue readingBiaxial

Debatable

Published by Editor B on Thursday, 16 October 2008

Since I didn’t get to sound off on these issues on the radio, maybe I’ll just give vent here.

I watched all four of the so-called debates. Mostly they were pretty boring. I thought the last one was the most interesting, but all in all they were disappointing.

The debates frustrate me. Once upon a time they were run by a non-partisan group, the League of Women Voters. But for the last twenty-odd years they’ve been put on (and we’ve all been put on) by a bipartisan commission. The debates are controlled by the two major parties — two of the most powerful political entities in the world — and as one might expect, they are constructed to serve the interests of those parties.

And, face it, those parties are old and entrenched. Yet they’re both trying to sell a message of change. The mind boggles. But I digress.

What frustrates me in the debates is what frustrates me in our national political dialog: The scope is too narrow. The dialog is so tightly circumscribed that we have come to examine and contrast minute differences of policy between Democrats and Republicans, magnifying these differences so greatly that it’s easy to forget that there is a much wider range of possibilities.

To some extent this magnification is justified. The Presidency of the United States is perhaps the most powerful office in the world. I acknowledge that even the smallest differences can have huge effects on all of us.

But surely we are impoverished by not allowing a broader range of political dialog.

Continue readingDebatable

Frustrated with Bebo

Published by Editor B on Tuesday, 14 October 2008

I’ve been researching social network sites for a presentation I’m making at the end of the month. There’s quite a few of them out there. As part of my research I’ve been signing up for all the major ones and exploring them a bit. I already had accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, Friendster, Orkut and LinkedIn, but now I’m also on Hi5, Cyworld and Bebo.

Most of these sites allow you to connect to your online address book. This is for two distinct purposes: 1) to see who else amongst your contacts may already be using the site, and/or 2) to invite contacts who aren’t using the site to join up. I’m not interested in flogging any of these social network sites, so I restrict my explorations to the first purpose.

Which brings me to Bebo.

Continue readingFrustrated with Bebo